How Fujifilm Came to the Ebola Fight

Last Tuesday, Fujifilm announced the release of the X30, the latest in a line of high-end digital cameras, featuring classic-looking bodies, that are popular among photo hobbyists seeking a simpler alternative to DSLR. The Japanese company enjoyed a boost in its stock during the week, though the new camera might not have been the reason for the jump. The product release immediately followed another announcement, this one by the Japanese government, regarding an anti-influenza drug developed by Toyama Chemical, an obscure pharmaceutical company that Fujifilm had quietly acquired five years ago. Japan said that Fujifilm was offering up the drug, Favipiravir, as a potential stopgap in the fight against an outbreak of Ebola that has, according to the World Health Organization, killed nineteen hundred people in West Africa, and that Médecins Sans Frontières just called for a global military and civilian response to stop.

The Fujifilm subsidiary’s small yellow tablets are marked アビガン, which is a Japanese rendering of the brand name Avigan. They inhibit the replication of viral genes within an infected cell, while also mitigating their ability to spread from one cell to another—a two-pronged approach to fighting influenza that Fujfilm says is unique. The drug was approved in March by Japan’s health ministry as a treatment for both novel and reëmerging forms of influenza, but researchers have theorized that it could be an effective emergency treatment for Ebola. So far, tests have only been conducted on mice, but the experimental options being developed by companies like GlaxoSmithKline, Mapp Biopharmaceutical, and Tekmira for managing Ebola are no more advanced. There are no approved treatments, cures, or vaccine for the virus, which has killed half of those who have been infected.

Avigan offers new hope because, since it received regulatory approval for sale in Japan in the spring, it has been manufactured on a much larger scale than the experimental drugs being developed specifically for Ebola. Supplies of ZMapp, which was created by the San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, have already been exhausted, and its results have been mixed. Two American doctors treated with ZMapp recovered, but a Liberian doctor who also received it died. Fujifilm’s Avigan stockpile would be sufficient to treat twenty thousand people—the exact number of infections that the World Health Organization has estimated might occur before the current outbreak is brought under control.

Also distinguishing Avigan from other experimental Ebola treatments and vaccines is the fact that its primary purpose is to combat influenza. That’s important because, as James Surowiecki wrote in the August 25th issue of the magazine, pharmaceutical companies have few economic incentives to develop single-dose drugs targeting diseases that mostly impact impoverished people in developing nations. Hisashi Moriyama, an analyst at JP Morgan Japan, told me that he doubted Fujifilm would charge much for Avigan if the World Health Organization does indeed ask for it. The company couldn’t afford to do this unless it was confident that it could earn enough revenue to cover the costs of bringing the drug to market.

The reason a company known for developing film began developing pharmaceuticals is simple: that’s where the money is. Unlike its former rival Kodak, which filed for chapter-eleven bankruptcy in 2012, Fujifilm was nimble in reshaping its business to suit the age of the digital camera, allowing it to weather a decade, the aughts, in which its film business went from producing two-thirds of the company’s profits to virtually none of them. By investing heavily in research and development in new areas, Fujifilm bucked the stereotypes of inflexibility and excessive bureaucracy that have haunted large Japanese companies since the nation’s massive real-estate and stock-market bubbles burst in the early nineteen-nineties.

Fujifilm’s most-sustained efforts at diversification have been in medicine and health, which are among the only markets expected to see continued growth in Japan, where one-fourth of the population is aged sixty-five years or older. In 2006—seventy years after Fujifilm began producing X-ray diagnostic-imaging systems and endoscopes—the company began selling vitamins, supplements, and cosmetics, and two years later it added pharmaceuticals to its growing health-care business by acquiring Toyama Chemical.

Kana Matsumoto, a spokesperson for Fujifilm, told me that health and medicine accounted for sixteen per cent of Fujifilm’s total sales in the last fiscal year. The company hopes to more than double that by 2018. Analysts regard Fujifilm’s ability to increase this sector of its business as imperative: Hisashi Moriyama recently said in a report that a thirty per cent share should be its baseline for successful growth. That same report also shows that Fujifilm is still capable of beating its former rivals on more familiar ground: sales of its Instax “checki” cameras, which produce the kind of instant, self-developing photos once associated with the iconic Kodak and Polaroid brands, are up. Whether some of Fujifilm’s gains will be offset, in the name of international goodwill, by a loss on its stockpile of Avigan may depend on the World Health Organization, which has yet to take the company up on its offer.

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